A Suitable Vengeance (Inspector Lynley, #4)(3)

Then a slight tremor in his hand, child of anxiety, told her that his caress was spurious, an instant’s placation of her feelings prior to making his nasty little purchase. She pushed him away.

“Sid.” Justin managed a respectable degree of sensual provocation, but Sidney knew that his mind and body were taken up with the ill-lit alleyway at the south end of the square. He would want to be careful to hide that from her. Even now he leaned towards her as if to demonstrate that foremost in his life at the moment was not his need for the drug but his desire to have her. She steeled herself to his touch.

His lips, then his tongue moved on her neck and shoulders. His hand cupped her breast. His thumb brushed her nipple in deliberate strokes. His voice murmured her name. He turned her to him. And as always, it was like fire, like loss, like a searing abdication of all common sense. Sidney wanted his kiss. Her mouth opened to receive it.

He groaned and pressed closer to her, touching her, kissing her. She snaked her hand up his thigh to caress him in turn. And then she knew.

It was an abrupt descent to reality. She pushed herself away, glaring at him in the dim light from the streetlamps.

“That’s wonderful, Justin. Or did you think I wouldn’t notice?”

He looked away. Her wrath increased.

“Just go buy your bloody dope. That’s why we’ve come, isn’t it? Or was I supposed to think it was for something else?”

“You want me to go to this party, don’t you?” Justin demanded.

It was an age-old attempt to shift blame and responsibility, but this time Sidney refused to play along. “Don’t you hit me with that. I can go alone.”

“Then why don’t you? Why did you phone me, Sid? Or wasn’t that you on the line this afternoon, honey-tongued and hot to get yourself laid at the evening’s end?”

She let his words hang there, knowing they were true. Time after time, when she swore she’d had enough of him, she went back for more, hating him, despising herself, yet returning all the same. It was as if she had no will that was not tied to his.

And for God’s sake, what was he? Not warm. Not handsome. Not easy to know. Not anything she once dreamed she’d be taking into her bed. He was merely an interesting face on which every single feature seemed to argue with all the others to dominate the bony skull beneath it. He was dark, olive skin. He was hooded eyes. He was a thin scar running along the line of his jaw. He was nothing, nothing…except a way of looking at her, of touching her, of making her thin boyish body sensual and beautiful and flaming with life.

She felt defeated. The air in the car seemed stiflingly hot.

“Sometimes I think of telling them,” she said. “They say that’s the only way to cure it, you know.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” She saw his fingers curl.

“Important people in the user’s life find out. His family. His employers. So he bottoms out. Then he—”

Justin’s hand flashed, caught her wrist, twisted her hand. “Don’t even think of telling anyone. Don’t even think of it. I swear if you do, Sid…if you do…”

“Stop it. Look, you can’t go on like this. What are you spending on it now? Fifty pounds a day? One hundred? More? Justin, we can’t even go to a party without you—”

He dropped her wrist abruptly. “Then get out. Find someone else. Leave me bloody well alone.”

It was the only answer. But Sidney knew she couldn’t do it and she hated the fact that she probably never would.

“I only want to help.”

“Then shut up, all right? Let me go down that sodding alley, make the buy and get out of here.” He shoved open the door and slammed it behind him.

Sidney watched him walk halfway across the square before she opened her own door. “Justin—”

“Stay there.” He sounded calmer, not so much because he was feeling any calmer, she knew, but because the square was peopled with Soho’s usual Friday night throng and Justin Brooke was not a man who generally cared for making public scenes.

She ignored his admonition, striding to join him, disregarding the certain knowledge that the last thing she ought to be doing was helping him get more supplies for his habit. She told herself instead that if she weren’t there, sharply on the lookout, he might be arrested or duped or worse.

“I’m coming,” she said when she reached him.

The whipcord of tension in his features told her he had moved beyond caring.

“As you like.” He headed towards the gaping darkness of the alley across the square.

Construction was underway there, making the alley mouth darker and narrower than usual. Sidney made a moue of distaste at the smell of urine. It was worse than she had expected it to be.

Buildings loomed up on either side, unlit and unmarked. Grills covered their windows and their entryways housed shrouded, moaning figures who conducted the sort of illicit business which the nightclubs of the district seemed eager to promote.

“Justin, where’re you planning to—”

Brooke raised a cautionary hand. Up ahead, a man’s hoarse cursing had begun to fill the air. It came from the far end of the alley where a brick wall curved round the side of a nightclub to form a sheltered alcove. Two figures writhed upon the ground there. But this was no love tryst. This was assault, and the bottom figure was a black-clad woman who appeared to be no match in either size or strength for her furious assailant.